Update: sounds like Alan (he processes the windgram data) was in the Apple fire evac zone, so he’s been without power and internet for several days. Glad to hear everything worked out ok for him.

He definitely gets a pass on the windgrams being down!

Thanks again, Alan, for providing such a valuable tool to the flying community.

It’s likely you’re seeing a cached version (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on iOS are quite bad at heavily caching documents like PDFs). Refresh a few times and you should see the updated version.

Afternoon. It wasn’t a full blown brawl, but there were verbal threats, shades being pulled off, and hands on throat. Not going to go into further detail yet.

Request for everyone: say hi to pilots you don’t recognize. I’m a shy introvert, but usually just doing that is enough to get pilots talking and also makes learning that they are new to the site very quick and easy. A quick briefing on the area and the AJX approach pattern, I think, would reduce a lot of trouble and danger with out of towners, and also have them walk away with a much more memorable (in a good way) flight.

We just had some HG pilots visiting this weekend that could have had a much better time for themselves and other pilots in the air if they had bothered to look at the site guidelines (one nearly clipped a PG doing figure eights in the PG approach and another overshot and landed in the bushes), so for those folks (since we can’t make everyone do their homework), an unsolicited in-person briefing would go a long way.

We will also be making some adjustments to some of the pages on the site (home page and the “Join” page) to make skipping over the approach pattern info a bit harder.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

Those are good points, Marc. Common sense isn’t so common, it would seem. Would most of us go to a new site and just launch without at least looking for a bit of information about the place first? Probably not (at least, I hope not).

Keep in mind that there is no “day use sign up sheet,” since day use is no more.

We do have the approach patterns on big posters in the LZ, but as you said, not sure how many read those. I’m not sure a sign on the stairs would help, but we could certainly try that out. In talking to pilots on launch, a scenario I’ve run into more than once is visiting pilots driving directly up to launch, so any signage in the LZ would be moot.

What seems to help (I try to do this as much as I can, but I’m only there usually once a week on the weekends) is saying hello to pilots that you don’t recognize and get them engaged in a little conversation. That makes it really easy to point them in the right direction for information, getting their membership squared away, and giving them a site intro if they haven’t had one already. We’ll need EVERYONE to participate in that to make that effective, but I think it could do the most good.

Awesome! Thanks Jeremy.